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Ottoman Imperial Portraiture and Transcultural Aesthetics

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Ottoman Imperial Portraiture and Transcultural Aesthetics 1 OTTOMAN ImperiAL PORTRAITUre AND TrANSCULTURAL AESTHETICS In his book Other Colors, Orhan Pamuk invokes the early twentieth-century Turkish poet Yahya Kemal’s response to Gentile Bellini’s 1480 portrait, Sultan Mehmed II (fig. 4). It is a painting, Pamuk notes, that has achieved iconic status as a symbol of the Ottoman sultanate in modern Turkish culture. Pamuk writes, “what troubled him was that the hand that drew the portrait lacked a nationalist motive.”1 In Kemal’s work, Pamuk finds an approach to the Ottoman past that is riven with the doubts of a Turkish writer strug- gling to position that history as part of a national cultural identity in the early years of the Turkish Republic. Not least among the challenges for both authors grappling with the connection between Ottoman portraiture and contemporary cultural identity is the fact that the past, like the present, was ineluctably forged through an engagement with European aesthetics.2 Yet what also emerges from Pamuk’s short response to this paint- ing, and the constellation of other portraits by Ottoman and Persian artists that were inspired by it, is the prospect of an alternative, more enabling engagement with this history of transculturation. The uncertain authorship of some of these paintings and the alternative readings they provoke for Pamuk as he entertains their attribution on each side of the East-West divide, for example, function for him as a reminder that “cultural influences work in both directions with complexities difficult to fathom.”3 Pamuk’s eloquent, ambivalent response to the legacy of the Ottoman engagement with Venetian Renaissance art is a provocation to my own study of British artists’ por- traits of the Ottoman sultans in the nineteenth century. Pamuk’s evocation of Yahya Kemal’s profound misgivings encapsulates the risks associated with cross-cultural 20 Figure 4. Gentile Bellini, Sultan Mehmed II, 1480. Oil on canvas, 69.9 × 52.1 cm. © The National Gallery, London. patronal transactions. The confluence of differing investments in the portrait process by patron and artist and the complex history of the painting’s later reception encapsulate the ways in which the work of art is potentially vulnerable to contrary purposes. One of the challenges that this chapter engages is how to theorize the shifting spatial and temporal articulations of such discrepant iterations. Among many portraits of the Ottoman sultans commissioned from foreign art- ists throughout the nineteenth century, one of the most influential was the folio that incorporated portraits of the sultans from the founding of the dynasty to the reign of Mahmud II, published in 1815 and known as the Young Album.4 It is a particularly pro- vocative case study of transculturation because of its intriguing, contested history. Both the circumstances of this album’s initial commission and its subsequent and repeated repurposings as it shuttled back and forth between Istanbul and London throughout the nineteenth century make it a compelling example of the contrary purposes to which the OTTOMAN IMPERIAL PORTRAITURE • 21 sultans’ portraits were deployed. It is precisely because of the mobility and interpretive mutability of this album that this case study provides a productive site from which to engage broader issues about how to theorize the artwork produced as a result of cross- cultural contact and how to assess what happens to cultural boundaries through such mobility. The Young Album did not simply reflect the imperial interests of the commis- sioning sultan nor of the British printmaker; instead it represented a range of interests and addressed different audiences as it shifted across time and space. The challenge is how to account for the historical mutability of boundary formation as this artwork gathered different audiences at different historical moments. How are the various cul- tural allegiances of both artist and patron inscribed within a portrait study of a foreign ruler? How are cultural boundaries articulated within such images whose formation is transacted across cultures? And what theoretical models of boundary formation are applicable here? Anthropologist Nancy Munn’s phenomenological approach to border theorization has been particularly resonant for me in conceptualizing these processes. Although her approach was developed in the very different domain of contemporary Australian Aboriginal Warlpiri culture, Munn’s emphasis on the mutability of space and time in the processes of boundary formation offers a model that has explanatory resonance with the Young Album. Munn analyzes the processes of boundary formation in Warlpiri culture where ancestral law imposes spatial limitations on designated individuals. Her phenomenological interpretation of the Warlpiri “Law truck” is a particularly compel- ling example of the spatio-temporal complexities of this mobile boundary formation. In Warlpiri society, the “Law truck” is the vehicle designated to carry key people in a ritual performance. During the time this truck is on the road, it is a mobile center of power, defining, as Munn characterizes it, “different excluded regions in its immediate vicinity at any given moment.”5 This power extends beyond the “immediate moving field” of the vehicle, affecting the whole route, thereby “carrying the power of boundary making with it” and projecting “temporary mobile signifiers of its delimiting powers onto the spatiocorporeal fields of others.”6 During these journeys the Law truck both establishes boundaries through zones of exclusion for those community members who are not within the vehicle and simultaneously brings all the people in the “affected regions” into a temporarily “imagined community” of “common, excluded travel space, a unitary spacetime.”7 Nancy Munn’s model of the “Law truck” underscores spatially and temporally provi- sional processes of boundary formation organized around a mobile, temporary center of power, whereby boundaries are renegotiated through the processes that both separate and connect individuals involved in this cultural ritual. An engagement with this model enables a theorization of the implications of the mobility of Ottoman royal portraits in the nineteenth century. To date, analyses of Ottoman royal portraiture have charted the iconographic innovations that unfolded across time within this long-standing tradition. So, too, scholars have investigated the differing audiences for these works, in particular 22 • OTTOMAN IMPERIAL PORTRAITURE registering a major shift toward the use of the sultans’ portraits as gifts to European rul- ers in the context of the Ottoman Empire’s new policy of participation within the Euro- pean diplomatic arena in the late eighteenth century.8 An engagement with Munn’s model can augment such analyses by enabling us to attend to ways in which distinctive interpretations of the artwork are hinged to its physical mobility, its affective power to gather its audience, and how the contingencies of boundary-marking processes that operate within and between artwork and audience differentially constitute and position that audience. Yet this model resists direct transposition because of the differences between con- texts. Munn’s interpretation is derived from a relatively stable system that operates effec- tively because of a shared understanding of ritual meanings within the culture she is addressing. The Young Album presents a much more fractured history where the object itself is profoundly reconfigured across cultures over time; consequently boundaries are renegotiated between divided centers of power in Britain and the Ottoman Empire. Notwithstanding these significant differences in context, this model can be usefully adapted to interpret the complex intrication of diverse motivations and allegiances and the spatio-temporal complexities of cross-cultural boundary formation in the protracted production and reception of the Young Album. BETWEEN ISTanBUL anD LONDON In 1806 the British printmaker John Young was approached by Mr. Green from the Levant Company to undertake a most unusual commission— a series of twenty-eight mezzotint prints, portraits of the Ottoman sultans from the founding of the empire up to the present day. His client was the reigning Ottoman ruler, Sultan Selim III, and although he did not deal directly with the Ottoman leader, it was clear that the sultan was the project’s guiding force. Young received instructions that a limited number of prints were to be taken from his plates and “every possible secrecy was to be observed during the progress of the work.” None of the final prints were to be kept by Young and “the pictures were, on no account, to be exhibited publicly or privately.” In order to ensure this, “the plates, when finished and printed, were to be given up to the [sultan’s] agent.”9 These interdictions temporarily established the album’s production as a process issuing from the delimiting power of the Ottoman sultan, incorporating the work of the British printmaker within the boundaries of Ottoman culture. In accepting this commission Young worked from the gouache portraits by an Otto- man-Greek, Kostantin Kapıdağlı, that were supplied to him by the Ottoman palace, and he was instructed to submit a sample of his work for the sultan’s approval before begin- ning the larger project. As the appointed mezzotint engraver to the Prince of Wales, Young was no doubt used to powerful clients with exacting demands, but this was a particularly exotic commission coming from inside the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul and circumscribed by such conditions of secrecy. Young duly submitted the print and OTTOMAN IMPERIAL PORTRAITURE • 23 Figure 5. John Young, Sultan Othman Khan I: Head of the Ottoman Imperial House (Sultan Othman— Khan Ier. Chef de la Maison Imp. Othomane). Plate 1 from A Series of Portraits of the Emperors of Turkey . With a Biographical Account of Each of the Emperors (London: W. Bulmer, 1815). Hand-colored mezzotint, 38 × 26 cm. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection (Folio B N 12). engraved plate of the founder of the Ottoman dynasty, Osman I. Both plate and print remain in the Topkapı Palace collection (fig.
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